A Quote by Adrian Piper

Racism is a visual pathology. — © Adrian Piper
Racism is a visual pathology.
Pathology, probably more than any other branch of science, suffers from heroes and hero-worship. Rudolf Virchow has been its archangel and William Welch its John the Baptist, while Paracelsus and Cohnheim have been relegated to the roles of Lucifer and Beelzebub. ... Actually, there are no heroes in Pathology-all of the great thoughts permitting advance have been borrowed from other fields, and the renaissance of pathology stems not from pathology itself but from the philosophers Kant and Goethe.
The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.
The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.
I'm a visual thinker. With almost all of my writing, I start with something that's visual: either the way someone says something that is visual or an actual visual description of a scene and color.
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.
When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.
And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist.
First there was racism. Then liberals created institutional racism and coded racism. You can only hear it with a dog whistle.
Well, I think my stand-up is often kind of visual. Not like Carrot Top visual, but visual.
I've seen and always been extremely aware of racism... casual racism, serious racism... all of that.
There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.
Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.
Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism.
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
As far as stimulus from the visual arts specifically, there is today in most of us a visual appetite that is hungry, that is acutely undernourished. One might go so far as to say that Protestants in particular suffer from a form of visual anorexia. It is not that there is a lack of visual stimuli, but rather a lack of wholesomeness of form and content amidst the all-pervasive sensory overload.
I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.
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